Chat topic:

Pharmacotherapy of treatment-resistant schizophrenia: evidence base and clinical challengesInvited guest author: Stefan Leucht, Professor of Psychiatry and Vice chairman at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy TU-München & Honorary Professor of Evidence-based Psychopharmacology, University of Aarhus.

A significant number of patients with schizophrenia do not respond adequately to an initial antipsychotic trial. What to do next? In case of treatment resistance, two strategies that are often used in clinical routine care contain dose increase of the current administered antipsychotic drug (dose escalation, high-dose treatment) and switch to another, new antipsychotic. According to available evidence, what approach should be preferred? Is it true that, after treatment failure with at least two different antipsychotic drugs, a monotherapy with clozapine is considered to be the treatment option of first choice? Which is the evidence in favour of combination treatment of two antipsychotics? What about augmentation of antipsychotics with other pharamcological agents?

These are some of the main questions that clinicians and patients face daily in clinical practice and these are the questions we will specifically address and answer during the tweet chat.

If you would like to pre-submit a question for Stefan and EBMH for the tweet chat, do send it by either direct messaging @EBMentalHealth using #EBMHchat on Twitter or on the EBMH Facebook page: /Evidence.Based.Mental.Health.

Participating in the tweet chat: the mechanics

To join in you will need to have a Twitter account. To sign up to Twitter, click here (it doesn’t take long and make sure you follow us!).

When it comes to the tweet chat, we suggest you use tchat.io. This is a specific site used for tweet chats as it cuts out all the other distractions on Twitter. Log into tchat.io using your Twitter details, then type #EBMHchat into the search bar. This pulls up all the tweets using the hashtag. You can tweet from here and it will automatically add the correct hashtag at the end of each tweet for those overexcited tweeps!

You can otherwise tweet using twitter, but you need to make sure you add the hashtag to each tweet otherwise we won’t see it.